The Brief

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas' 2026 congressional redistricting plan pushed by President Donald Trump likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

The court's conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.

The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump's efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year's elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle. The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If that ruling eventually holds, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump's demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state's new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It's not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.

The fire that started on a cargo ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles is now "substantially contained," according to the Port of Los Angeles.

Authorities say fire crews and ship crew members are continuing to put out the fire.

LAFD captain Adam VenGerpen told LAist the cargo ship — "ONE Henry Hudson" — was moved to open waters, less than a mile from the port, to ensure the safety of those living in San Pedro and Wilmington, as well as port operations.

A shelter-in-place order for residents in San Pedro and Wilmington has been lifted, according to VenGerpen.

Authorities say all crew members on the ship are accounted for with no injuries reported.

At one point, more than 180 firefighters were fighting the fire, which was reported at 6:38 p.m. by crew onboard as an "electrical fire" that started below deck. An explosion was reported by authorities about an hour later.

A number of cargo bays contained some hazardous materials, VenGerpen said.

He said a number of containers are believed to be damaged, but the extent won't be known until the fire is fully contained.

"Many of these cargo containers are stacked one on top of another, and they were not able to get cranes in there to start removing these," he said.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

Demolition is underway in parts of Valley Plaza, a shopping center in North Hollywood. The razing comes after years of vacancy and a vote to declare six of its dilapidated buildings a public nuisance. But did you know that this was once one of the most important shopping centers on the West Coast?

Valley Plaza may look like an ordinary strip mall that kicked the can due to the rise of online retail, but it’s actually a shell of what it once was. We’ll explore its past and wax nostalgic about its heyday with tales from Angelenos.

The novelty of Valley Plaza

The plaza first opened in 1951 at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Victory boulevards, and with it, the San Fernando Valley began a new era. Post-war, the suburbs were rapidly growing, and this center was right in the middle of all the action.

The shopping experience we know today — where you can go to one large location and find every store you need — was just starting to take shape. When developer Bob Symonds designed Valley Plaza as an open-air shopping center, it was believed to be one of the first of its kind in the United States, especially one to do so at such a scale.

His “ultra-modern” plaza got national attention for a few reasons. For one, Symonds is credited as a pioneer in Southern California for recognizing the potential of putting retail hubs next to freeways. Most developers still focused on boulevards. He also put hundreds of parking spots in front of the mall, rather than in the back, which was the normal practice. The “mammoth” shopping area, as it was hailed, was ultimately special because it brought together a huge range of stores.

I put out a call on social media for people to send me their memories.

“I remember how excited we were to have real stores near us,” wrote Pat DeCurtins, who lived in North Hollywood between the ‘40s and ‘60s. “We no longer had to order all our clothes from Spiegels Catalogue. We could buy clothes in a REAL store.”

A flooded intersection next to Valley Plaza in 1962.

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Gordon Dean

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Valley Times Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

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One of those was Sears, which opened its largest location at the time in the U.S. at Valley Plaza (it apparently smelled like popcorn, too). Sears joining was the key to getting other companies onboard. Thrifty also opened a store, signing the longest lease in its history at the time for 25 years.

Symonds was known for courting big companies and curating the plaza’s stores to blend the essential, mundane and desirable. It had mom-and-pop shops, innovative self-service grocery stores, a theater, an ice skating rink and restaurants like the Hawaiian spot Kel Luau.

“My little son and I would go to this tropical style restaurant in Valley Plaza mall across from the ice skating arena,” wrote Cassandra Adams. “We would have blue drinks from a glass shell with two long straws. They would put a sugar cube floating on top and light it on fire. It was really fun!”

Valley Plaza’s downward spiral

Valley Plaza was a roaring success for a while. It brought in $100 million in annual sales in its first five years and was a big employment boost for the community. The plaza would later expand to cover more than 1 million square feet, ranking it as one of the largest in the nation.

A group of store managers pose in front of new Valley Plaza signage with developer Bob Symonds and honorary Valley Plaza mayor Anita Gordon in April 1957.

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Valley Times Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

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It even had the tallest building in the San Fernando Valley with the Los Angeles Federal Savings and Loan Tower, now known as Valley Plaza Tower. Built in 1960, the 165-foot-tall building was one of the first skyscrapers constructed after the repeal of the city of L.A.’s building height limit a few years prior.

In the decades after, Valley Plaza slowly declined. The area’s demographics shifted, meaning shopping habits changed, and vacant spots in the center weren’t replaced with similar quality stores. The plaza’s future was also hard to plan because it had dozens of owners at one point, ranging from corporations to a 90-year-old widow, according to UCLA research.

But one event may have sealed its fate: the Northridge Earthquake of 1994. According to an L.A. City Council motion, many of the buildings were red-tagged, and tenants who didn’t have the capital for repairs got evicted.

Since then, Valley Plaza has been a thorn in L.A.’s side. While some of it has been redeveloped, numerous plans for the center have failed. Owners haven’t fixed the broken-down lots. L.A. leaders even explored the possibility of using eminent domain to take it over.

It’s not known yet what will happen to Valley Plaza once demolition is completed, but some say it will be sorely missed.

“So many memories,” wrote Rhonda Theodoulou, who had her ninth birthday there. “It’s been a shame what that area has looked like for many years. I hope it’s developed into a newer thriving area again.”

A pop artist, educator and nun who later left the Catholic Church, Kent’s colorful silkscreen prints gained attention during challenging moments in L.A.’s past, from the 1960s civil rights movement to apartheid.

Kent died in 1986, but her powerful messages of social justice have perhaps at no time in Los Angeles history been clearer. And now her work is resonating with a new generation of activists and art enthusiasts, with a celebration of her life today at the Marciano Arts Foundation, also the site of a current exhibition of her photographs.

“In hard times, we always go back to the poets to tell us how to live,” said Hanneke Skerath, curator of the exhibit Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images, open through January 24 at the Marciano Arts Foundation in Mid-Wilshire.

A print by Corita Kent from 1963, titled "luke 2.14, 51"

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Courtesy Corita Art Center

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“We go back to Corita, to… artists who always dealt with these bigger questions and were part of a community and [who] built community.”

From religious order to the world of Pop Art

Largely self-taught, Ken started making her signature silkscreen prints while teaching at the arts department at Immaculate Heart College Arts by Griffith Park for nearly two decades until the late 1960s. Her style evolved to become part of the pop art movement, pulling inspiration from the mundane (cereal boxes emblazoned with “The best to you each morning”) to the divine (“be of love”) to the political (“stop the bombing”).

Her silkscreen prints have been shown internationally, the exhibit at Marciano Arts Foundation focuses on Kent’s work as a photographer — and a chronicler of Los Angeles through her teaching at the arts department at Immaculate Heart College.

Chronicler of L.A. as a photographer

Distorted ad, source material, 1967, 35 mm slide.

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Courtesy Corita Art Center

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Student project, Immaculate Heart College, ca. 1966, 35 mm slide

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Courtesy Corita Art Center

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“Of course, she became famous for her silk screens and prints, but she would use these [photographic] images all the time in the classroom, but also in her public talks all around the country,” Skerath said of Kent’s photography. Skerath noted that while Kent only had an analog slide carousel to show her work, the exhibit at the Marciano took some liberties to make her photographs feel larger than life.

To take in the full exhibit at the Marciano, Skerath set up bean bag chairs for visitors to sit in the unique space (the museum is housed in a former Masonic temple). Kent left over 15,000 slides in her archive that the Corita Art Center digitized. “It's like this treasure trove,” Skerath said. “Those images have been used as illustrations but never really presented in an exhibition,” she said. Skerath added that she felt “close to Corita” in selecting the show’s images. “I was able to make a selection of over a thousand images that, for me, really represent her way of seeing.”

Installation view of Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images at Marciano Art Foundation.

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Michael Anthony Hernandez

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Courtesy Marciano Art Foundation

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Nellie Scott runs the Corita Art Center, which was founded in 1997 but recently relocated to a new space in the Arts District. She hopes that the Maricano exhibit helps shed more light on who Kent was as a person as well as an artist. “We know that [photography] is part of her process. But for people to see the intimacy maybe behind the scenes of what it was like to be a nun, that they're human and … if [Kent] was alive today, she'd wear orange and she'd laugh and she'd go grocery shopping.”

Amongst the more than one thousand images projected in immersive format at the Marciano exhibit are L.A. landmarks both small and large, from everyday sites like the Market Basket (now Lazy Acres in Los Feliz) all the way to Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers installation.

A print by Corita Kent from 1969, titled "king's dream"

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Arthur Evans

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Courtesy Corita Art Center

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Scott sees the photographs and Kent’s teachings around Los Angeles with her students as a social justice tool. “Looking and seeing are not the same thing,” she said. “Sometimes taking the whole world [in] is really hard at once. But if you can start with the square foot you're standing in, you can start with your neighbor, if you can start with your street – it's like, okay, I can start taking everything in.”

Corita Day on Saturday

Corita Kent

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Courtesy Corita Art Center

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The Corita Art Center is one of the few art spaces in the country dedicated to a single female artist and the new space, which exhibits Kent’s work and is responsible for maintaining her archive, is open once a week to the public. Scott has been working closely with the Marciano Arts Foundation on the new show. “When the invitation from Hanneke [came in] …especially with everything that's happening in the world, to be able to amplify messages of hope and peace and love– how could we not share that?” Scott said.

Skerath and Scott are aware that Kent isn’t a household name like her contemporaries Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha, but they hope these new efforts bring more attention to someone who’s been overlooked in the pop art canon. “There's been great surveys of Corita’s work, but oh gosh, is a really deep retrospective overdue,” Scott said. An upcoming documentary from filmmaker and former Corita Art Center consultant Jillian Schultz,You Should Never Blink, is also looking to do just that when it hits festivals next year.

Kent “absolutely deserves a cradle-to-grave biographical documentary but beyond that, it's really important for us to show how her legacy lives on and how influential she is specifically for artists living and working and practicing now,” Schultz said.

Five businesses at one of Altadena’s community hubs are celebrating their reopening today with a celebration after damage from the January fires.

The L.A. fires have displaced thousands of people, from residents to business owners, and destroyed a number of homes and businesses.

The five businesses at Mariposa Junction — located at the intersection of Lake Avenue and Mariposa Street — considered closing but have reopened to help their neighborhood rebuild.

“We’re just hoping that the people who are in the neighborhood will remember to come shop local and that hopefully some of the people, people who are displaced but close by will remember to come up and patronize the businesses as well,” said Caroline Britton, owner of Carciofi Design, one of the shops that's reopening.

Retro fashion boutique Sidecca, Betsy Restaurant, Ms. Dragon Print & Copy and McGinty's Gallery are also part of the reopening celebration.

The January fires were the most destructive in L.A. County history, killing at least 30 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures.

The one-year anniversary is approaching as efforts to rebuild are ongoing.

It will take years for residential and business areas to return to their vibrancy before the fires, if at all. That’s why these business owners want to celebrate this accomplishment.

Details

Mariposa Junction Grand Reopening
Saturday
10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
2455 Lake Ave., Altadena
More details about the opening are here